Prose and Poetry

The Girl by the Blood Moon

I don’t write for glory or fame. I write because the blood in my body flows through the veins and arteries and into my pen; so that the words I write may bleed; so that they may drip like a leaking faucet; so that men as tough as roots that keep trees from hurling down, may turn as quiet as sin. But above all I write for the Girl by the Blood Moon; so she may feel through my words what people feel through touch. I am enriched for I have read that when you’ve finally loved someone down to the salt in their bones, you may write about them forever. She lives by the Blood Moon because she is rare, while I am common. I dream of her for that is the only place where all is perfectly aligned in my vicious mind. In strange scenes and stranger lands we meet for hours at length, since an hour in the real world may be several lifetimes in the contours of my dream. We have such cause to entangle in the webs of my imagination. The threads of which are so fragile that a mere touch could force me to twist in bed, without the knowledge that with every twist I edge closer to the end of my bed. Forgetting that when I finally fall, I will awaken again to this darker world, panting and sweating down to my toes; the cold sweat evaporating from the surface of the skin on my head, for the organ beneath it had toiled and exasperated itself once again in the most unknown of landscapes and yet with one of the most known faces it had the courage to retain what now seems likely to be forever.

I dream of myself with her in the opposite ends of a coffee table. The one cup we both share because my mind is vicious and requires that my lips feel every part of the glass that touches her lips. We do not taste the coffee since a certain curse condemned us from the ability to taste or smell anything in this world. A painful reminder that this is all an illusion, that will quickly mix with the remnants of dying nerve cells, past the years, but until such time, they will harvest upon the emotions that linger with every electric pulse. Her eyes sparkle under the minimum lighting of this arena. No one else in the room has a face, except her. And I shudder over the idea of looking at myself in the mirror, for I know I will be faceless too. All that I notice are her playful eyes and somehow my reflection exists nowhere but in those dark eyes, perhaps because all this urgent love is of any worth only if she decides to lay a glance at my direction, setting fires in places within that otherwise runs cold, and illuminating areas that have always remained dark as the world beneath my feet. We rise from our coffee table and leave through a door without the slightest need to leave any sumptuous amount for their services, because my mind is already so heavily in debt that the mere need for such unwanted exercise would force my eyes wide open, and in my dream itself, my greatest nightmare is the idea of waking up to unwanted details and needless moralities.

Everything seems to be in place here. The cars are running at speeds favorable to my thinking and people around are refraining from making eye on eye contact. But she walks beside me. The way her body sways with every step reminds me of the delicate beings that have evolved under the guidance of Venus herself. Her majestic hair falls and lofts down her tiny lady-like shoulders. Her entire body seeming unjustly too fragile. The idea that her bones would bend with the slightest of weight crosses my mind. Her hands were velvet and fingers so cherishably feminine. At a moments notice we are on the streets, at another, we are among vast green hills. Lying on the green grass and pointing at the shapeless clouds, trying hard to assign them shapes that our minds randomly care to choose. She giggles and laughs, displaying her finely set teeth. Her red lips only enhancing the craft that went into the making of her face. Her cheekbones finer than those sculpted on marble, and her chin coming down to a cone. We look at each other as somewhere about, my mind creates dark clouds looming and heading our way. I knew that the devil had begun whispering into my ears. I lift her up and place her on the seat next to mine, in a car that must have been there all along. We drive faster than the winds and her laughter exhilarates. I recognize the sound of music escaping though her lips, but I cannot identify the song, perhaps because my mind had begun playing every song she ever sang for me, in a hurry, because the darkness was looming closer now than ever before.

My car takes off, for now it had wings. Wings spanning greater than any aircraft built by man for this one was built by my mind. I turn the wheel and we dive into a barrel roll. There is no need for safety because she is safest in the undulations of my mind. While one hand rested on the controls of this heavy ungodly machinery, my other hand along with my fingers are entangled with that of hers. We rush our unnamed machine through the skies and towards the moon that was darker than any shade of red I could possibly have imagined. For once it seemed as though my mind wasn’t the only mind that went into the making of this dream, and one look at her sobering face, and I knew that I wasn’t wrong. Tears had begun to well along her lower eye lid, which caused my heart to sink lower than the deepest point in the pacific. All of a sudden now, her tears were running down her cheeks. Shimmering under the light of the moon. The grip between our hands was quickly loosening. The distance between our seats was growing with each drop of tear that escaped down the lining of her face and falling into the abyss. I was no longer holding her and the controls to this vehicle had failed. She was going away and as she went on, she raised her hand and gestured what my mind could only comprehend as goodbye. With overwhelming tears of anguish, that nearly forced my eyes shut, I yanked at the controls as I continued to plummet in the direction of the dark clouds until that moment when I was completely enveloped by the hue.

At this moment, a lightning pierced though the glass of my window and hurled me out into space. I was falling, rapidly losing altitude. I could begin to see now that the dark cloud was elementally made of every memory I made with her. Every last one of them. To the very first conversation, to every fight, to every reason to blush late at night. Everything had been smoked black. They were no longer mine to keep. They were going to watch me die. I turned around and now I faced the fall. The earth was dark and there was no light. I managed a glimpse at the direction of the blood moon, hoping to catch sight of her, but she was long gone. The fall was taking effect. My physical body was preparing for the kick. I focused, and pondered upon the possibility of summoning to myself something that might reduce the impact of the fall. I focused hard. And it is then that it struck me harder than the lightning that was responsible for my present predicament..

This wasn’t my dream at all…

I recalled her tears. I recalled her eyes. They weren’t looking at me. They were looking through me. She was looking at someone else. Someone who knew this craft better than I ever would. And now I was at his mercy.
The ground now seemed just a few meters away from me. I prepared my mind for the jerk that would force me awake. I paused my breathing and shut my eyes so that the remaining tears could trickle down my face. But the jerk never came. I opened my eyes, and to my horror, I lay flat on my back, with my limbs tied to the ground, unable to feel the kick, I would be unable to wake up. As I struggled to attain my senses, I realized that above me loomed a figure greater than anything that my mind was capable of imagining. He stood tall and looked at me with great gratification. As if I was exactly where he wanted me. I let out a cry but he paid no heed. His face was just a shadow, with only eyes that could be seen. I attempted to bend my mind. Fight him. But he was too large. Larger than what I would ever be. He deflected all my mind games proving his skill was too fine for my understanding. I looked at him. Face to face. And he waved his hands in the air and materialized a bright image of her, the Girl by the Blood Moon, cradled between his two hands. Letting the idea sink in that this was the last time that I was going to see her face. And with that, he clenched his fist and everything went dark. I could see nothing. I was hostage in a mind beyond my control, but I was breathing, but that was all.